I heard you; and I heard you turning over the dictionary to seek out the hard words, and then cursing because you couldn't read their explanations!' The young man evidently thought it too bad that he should be laughed at for his ignorance, and then laughed at for trying to remove it.

I had a similar notion; and, remembering Mrs.Dean's anecdote of his first attempt at enlightening the darkness in which he had been reared, I observed,--'But, Mrs.Heathcliff, we have each had a commencement, and each stumbled and tottered on the threshold; had our teachers scorned instead of aiding us, we should stumble and totter yet.' 'Oh!' she replied, 'I don't wish to limit his acquirements: still, he has no right to appropriate what is mine, and make it ridiculous to me with his vile mistakes and mispronunciations! Those books, both prose and verse, are consecrated to me by other associations; and I hate to have them debased and profaned in his mouth! Besides, of all, he has selected my favourite pieces that I love the most to repeat, as if out of deliberate malice.' Hareton's chest heaved in silence a minute: he laboured under a severe sense of mortification and wrath, which it was no easy task to suppress.
I rose, and, from a gentlemanly idea of relieving his embarrassment, took up my station in the doorway, surveying the external prospect as I stood.
He followed my example, and left the room; but presently reappeared, bearing half a dozen volumes in his hands, which he threw into Catherine's lap, exclaiming,--'Take them! I never want to hear, or read, or think of them again!' 'I won't have them now,' she answered.

'I shall connect them with you, and hate them.' She opened one that had obviously been often turned over, and read a portion in the drawling tone of a beginner; then laughed, and threw it from her.

'And listen,' she continued, provokingly, commencing a verse of an old ballad in the same fashion.
But his self-love would endure no further torment: I heard, and not altogether disapprovingly, a manual check given to her saucy tongue.

The little wretch had done her utmost to hurt her cousin's sensitive though uncultivated feelings, and a physical argument was the only mode he had of balancing the account, and repaying its effects on the inflictor.